Slackware 12.0 released

Slackware 12.0 released

Posted Jul 5, 2007 8:19 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Slackware 12.0 released by jordanb
Parent article: Slackware 12.0 released

That's the thing I ran into with Debian.

It's not so much apt-get that does anything magical, it's the time and effort that the Debian project puts into making a large number of quality software packages.

When running stable you don't have to worry about a new Samba version breaking your configuration file or some part of LAMP updated that breaks some server side script or whatever. This is the same as you get with Slackware.

But what is extra is that Debian also does a pretty decent job of making sure that upgrades between releases are nice. When you upgrade between different versions things generally go well.

With Slackware it's ok as long as you stick with the packages that are provided by Slackware, but once you venture off on your own with compiling software and such then you loose a lot of the benifit of having a quality distribution. Over a period of a year or two you end up with a fairly large number of custom libraries and applications that you just don't know will survive the upgrades. Plus you have to go through all the recompile again to upgrade those packages and it's 100% up to you to stay on top of security patches and other such things. This is less of a problem with Debian just because the massive amount of packages aviable that there is usually very little reason to have to run much software compiled from source.

In other words Debian allows me to be more lazy.

I do like slackware a lot though. It's great how it's stable and how it stays out of your way. With Debian apt-get and the packages rule your computer, you sacrifice a lot of control and it was hard for me to deal with that after moving from Slackware to Debian.

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